I'm a dad and an engineer who likes eating. I'm not a chef, a food photographer or a web designer.

I hope this site will get better as I learn how to run one. The photography should improve. The layout will change. I will almost certainly discover better ways of doing things that currently seem perfectly sensible.

That doesn't mean the recipes are guesses or at least not by the time you read them.

They're the food I actually make. The aim is to record what works, work out what matters, remove the stuff that doesn't, and explain the useful bits without turning dinner into a research project. You will see some explanations about the why, I include them because I think its interesting - maybe you will too.

Most recipes have a Basic version and an Upgrade.

Basic isn't meant to be the bad version. It's what I cook when I want a good meal with less effort or I'm scrounging through the fridge.

Upgrade is there when some extra time, ingredients or technique actually gives you something worthwhile in return. If there isn't a meaningful upgrade to be had, I'd rather admit that than add six ingredients and pretend the recipe became more sophisticated.

Sometimes that means the Upgrade is a slow cook. Sometimes it's a better sauce, a different technique or a crispier crust. Occasionally it means spending far too long making coleslaw so you can try something from a youtube video.

There is no deliberate effort here to make everything historically authentic. While it can be fun, if the difference between eating something or not, is strict adherence to a recipe - I will opt for being less strict.

Sometimes the traditional technique is also the best technique. When that happens, we'll happily use it. You should try making traditional Carbonara, first time you will probably scramble the eggs and wonder why you bothered. But not being able to buy Guanciale doesnt mean you dont try, if all you have is bacon, use bacon.

Every recipe on this site has been made by me, photographed by me (yes I know you can tell) and eaten by my family.

These are living recipes. They might change. They might not. I have had to figure out how to turn what I normally do from Basic to Upgrade, or vice versa. Some of them I'm not convinced have hit their final form. Some are things I have been making for years and never measured anything.

A recipe being on this site means I have cooked it and put it in front of my own family.

After months of building the site, I still dont really know how it all works.

AI has helped me turn what I want the site to do into code, organise pages, chase down errors and turn my increasingly specific opinions about things like sausage gravy and potato-flake schnitzel crumbs into something resembling a functioning website.

It has also been used while drafting and editing recipes, but it doesn't get the final say on the food. Every recipe is cooked, tested, reviewed and edited by me before it goes live.

There is only so much editorial ownership anyone can claim over instructions like one egg and 100 g flour per serve. That recipe is not a secret. I am not planning to list unique recipes that real chefs have perfected - they have their own cookbooks for that.

AI is just the hammer I need for this particular nail.

The recipe photos are taken while I'm actually making the food. There isn't a studio kitchen, a food stylist or a replacement plate waiting off-camera because the first one stopped looking shiny.

Some of them will be better than others. The photography should improve as I learn what I'm doing.

In the meantime, at least the food in the picture has a strong chance of looking like the food that actually comes out of the recipe becuase it went from that photo to the dinner table to a stomach.

Websites cost money to keep online. If advertising can cover some or all of that cost, I'm going to let it.

The aim is to keep the advertising relatively unobtrusive. You came here for a recipe, so an ad shouldn't make finding or following that recipe unnecessarily difficult.

If the ads are being shit — covering content, interrupting the recipe, making the page miserable on mobile or otherwise getting in the way — let me know.

That's something to fix, not something you should simply have to tolerate.